


the body i am chasing through the grass

by littleghost



Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Character Study, Foster Care, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-23
Updated: 2019-02-23
Packaged: 2019-11-04 03:49:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17890940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littleghost/pseuds/littleghost
Summary: Amy Bendix is a forgotten girl.





	the body i am chasing through the grass

When she is five, she begins elementary school. Her school is in Brooklyn, a small place beside a church and a grocery store. On the first day, her mom walks to her to the front door, says hello to the secretary and the kindergarten teacher. Amy runs on ahead, because the classroom is full of potential friends and fun toys, and she’s excited to spend a day away from her apartment.

Even at the age of five, Amy is smart. She knows her parents aren’t that good at being parents, and their apartment is always dirty and full of other people and bad smells. Her room is an oasis to her, with its ugly grey walls and scraped hardwood floors and broken window that’s always cracked. She hides in her room but she can still hear.

School means she spends most of the day away from her parents. And after school she can go to the church, because churches always like little girls like Amy. Churches are full of old women who click their tongues and coo over Amy when she tells them her parents work late. They always give her a snack and let her sit in on their Bible studies. She doesn’t get what they’re talking about when they talk about Elijah the Prophet or Colossals.

Amy goes to school to learn, and remakes herself.

At school, she becomes Amanda. Amy is her nickname, but she wants to be mature, she tells Miss Hargrove. Miss Hargrove smiles gently at her in that way all adults do, and calls her Amanda. All her friends call her Amanda too, because they don’t know any better. All they know is that Amanda is great at hopscotch and can jump rope with the two ropes and knows how to do pretty braids.

At home, she goes back to being Amy. It’s the name her mom yells when something happens, or when Amy opens the door. Her mom is almost always home, and her dad goes to work early in the morning and comes back late at night. At night, some of her parents’ friends come over and they laugh loudly and the apartment always smells worse.

On Saturdays, Amy goes to the playground two blocks away from the apartment building. Her friends say they go there, and usually Liz and Alice are there with their moms. Liz and Alice always smile wide when they see Amanda, and the three of them play house or pretend to be pirates. 

On Sundays, Amy goes to the church by the school because she’s guaranteed two meals and the old ladies think she’s some type of religious. On Sundays, Amy is “Little Amy” and she gets mints and cheek pinches and told to light the candles. She’s a constant acolyte, holding the lighter in one hand and the cross in the other. She’s holy, holy, singing the hymns becauses Miss Waters is right beside her.

Amy gets to go to that school beside the church for two years, and everyone calls her Amanda. The old ladies get in on it, too, calling her “Miss Amanda” like she’s a real grown-up. She still lights the candles for them.

Except, one day at school she gets called to the office. And Miss Wilson, the secretary, has a tight smile on her face and a policewoman crouches down next to her and says, “Amy, your parents were in an accident.”

 

She starts second grade at a new school. Her new teacher is Mr. Jones, and he has a nice smile. She goes up to him and says, “Can you call me Eliza? It’s my middle name.” She doesn’t actually have a middle name, her parents never bothering to give her one. She likes the name Eliza because it reminds her of Liz, who she misses a lot. She even misses the cheek pinches at the church.

Her new school is big, with metal detectors at the doors and a busy road in front of it. She moved schools and houses, having been placed with a couple by the state. Her parents died, and she gets told she has new parents. At least these seem to care about her more than the other ones.

Their names are Bill and Leah Boswell, and they have a small apartment and one cat. Both have jobs, but Leah always has a snack ready when Amy gets off the bus. They’re nice enough, but in a way that makes Amy want to hide. She’s not used to this.

On weekdays, she goes to school and is Eliza. On Saturdays, she stays in her room watching cartoons and reading books. On Sundays, they go to the church down the street.

She’s not an acolyte again, but she knows the prayers and the hymns. Bill and Leah are very into the church, with Bible studies and Wednesday night suppers and volunteering every other weekend. Sometimes, they drag Amy along. Other times, they leave her alone at the apartment.

Amy likes those times the most. She gets to play with Lima the cat as much as she wants. She can watch cartoons on the big TV. She can play the music she wants to play. She likes those weekends the most, because she isn’t Amy, or Amanda, or Eliza. She isn’t the kid with dead parents.

She’s just her.

It falls apart months later, because Amy learns she’s good at one thing. She’s good at making things fall apart. She tells Leah about Bill, and what he does at night. Leah doesn’t believe her, though. She and Bill send her back.

She spends a few nights in the group home, in a room with a girl a little bit older than her. Neither of them have reached double digits.

“You should’ve just let it happen,” says the girl. Her name is Josie, or Hannah, or Emily. “If you get a good home, do anything to keep it.”

Amy doesn’t know what a good home is, and tells Josie-Hannah-Emily that.

“At least two meals and your own bed,” the girl says. From what she’s seen on TV, Amy doesn’t think that’s what makes up a good home. Who is she to say, though, when Josie-Hannah-Emily looks older than her baby-fat cheeks say.

 

Amy starts middle school when she’s in another group home. Foster parents willing to take her in have dwindled, not wanting an older kid or the girl with more homes than fingers. Amy’s glad. She doesn’t say why she leaves every home she’s had, because her caseworker never believes her. There’s too many kids in the New York system for an overworked woman to try and save them all.

In middle school, she’s Nina, and she wears dark clothing and cuts her hair into a bob. It doesn’t look good, but she doesn’t really care. Her new friends say they like Nina’s hair, though, and think she’s really pretty. Her new friends invite her out to smoke by the dumpsters during lunch and she agrees. Adam gives her a clove cigarette, but she likes the regular ones Kira has more. Sometimes Dylan has a joint, and she’ll take only one hit.

Her caseworker changes districts when she’s in eighth grade, and her new one gets her to a new group home. It’s a bad one, with too many kids and not enough food. Amy gets a job at the corner store, putting all her money into grocery shopping. She and her roommate, Heaven, have a stash of food in duffel bags under their beds. If Mrs. Mason, the matron of the home, ever found out, Amy doesn’t know what’ll happen.

She makes sure Maisie and Tom and James and Laci and Winnie get food before she even thinks about having some herself. And by the time all the kids are fed, it’s late at night and Amy has more things to worry about. 

She goes to school as Nina, and goes to the home as Amanda. She gets Heaven to call her Steph, and she meets a boy uptown who calls her Baby. She keeps taking as many names as she can remember until she’s torn to pieces, no longer Amy but whatever the people she’s with seem to think she is.

 

She meets Fiona through Kira, and the woman takes one look at her before saying, “I think you’re a Kylie.” And she gets Amy a fake I.D. with the name Kylie Mason on it, and it says she’s a few weeks from 18 when she’s barely 16, and Amy smiles so bright.

Fiona gives her a lot of names. There’s a section of her backpack that’s filled with I.D.s, besides the ones she’s had to trash. She keeps Kylie and Alice, Charlotte and Sarah, Leelah and Abby. Fiona gives her a name and a place to stay, and Amy thinks  _ this is it _ . She and Mike and Jane and Stan all run the same jobs together, all get thai together, all sneak into movies together. It’s a home and a family, and Amy’s never been happier.

Even when she spends her nights as a different person, no longer Little Amy, no longer the girl who blonde hair who could recite a few Bible verses by heart. Instead, she’s Jamie or Lily, with brown hair and a mean smile. She doesn’t remember any of those verses, or how it felt to carry a heavy cross. She doesn’t think God would want her to, anyways.

 

She’s Rachel in Chicago, except that goes to hell.

 

Detroit and Larkville know Rachel, too.

 

And then she’s back in New York.

 

She’s Rachel until she’s not, until she’s locked in a room and suddenly she’s Amy, a little girl locked in the basement with no way out. She’s Amy at age nine, age twelve. Doors only locked from the outside.

And Frank takes it. Lets her beat on his chest and yell at him, with that look on his face like he knows. He doesn’t. He was a good ol’ boy, until he wasn’t. That’s not even something they have in common.

In New York, she’s Amy. That’s all she’ll ever be, even if she hasn’t been anywhere near her old houses. In New York, she sheds every other name like she’s molting. She just Amy, Amy, Amy. She walks by a church and remembers with stunning clarity the feeling of holding a cross and a lighter. She remembers handing the plates to the ushers, and smiling at old ladies as they pinch her cheeks.

Frank and her stake out a private school, and Amy imagines herself as one of those students. No doubt she’d ask them to call her Amanda, and she’d laugh with her friends about cute boys. She doesn’t think she would’ve been like that, even if her parents weren’t druggies. She wouldn’t be able to take a place like that. She needs New York, the roughest parts of it. Being normal wasn’t ever something she could do.

 

John holds a gun to her head and Frank says, “That kid whose head you’re pointing a gun at? I’d do anything for her.”

And he tells her to run and Amy does, heart beating in her ears until she sees him again, bloodied but smiling. And Amy realizes, this is the only place that has let her be.

 

Frank sends her down to Florida and Amy  _ tries _ . She wants to be whoever Frank thinks she can be, a normal girl who can get past the last few months. Except she can’t be that girl. It’s not in her bones, in her DNA. She’s Amy Bendix, a girl who’s been tossed around the state and been shot at more times than she can count. She can’t ever be normal.

Even if she takes on another name, even if Joe at the dive school calls her Miss Kate, she can’t shed her name like she used to. Joe calls her Miss Kate but Amy misses the way Frank called her kid, and his unbearably soft eyes. She misses the way Frank would smooth down her hair like she was a little girl, misses the way he laughed.

Amy knows that she’s not a normal girl and Frank isn’t a normal guy, but she misses him. She misses what they had together, a home.

It’s all she ever wanted.

 

After Bill tries to kiss her—and Amy laughs when she remembers what the last Bill did to her—Amy catches the next bus to New York. It’s not until they cross the Massachusetts state line that she realizes she doesn’t know where Frank is, but that’s never stopped her before. She knows Curt’s number, and some dude’s named Lieberman. She calls Curt first, because he at least knows her.

Frank’s at the Lieberman’s, she learns, so she goes there anyways. She knows why, knows that Frank’s probably messed up after taking down a portion of a gang the other day, but she doesn’t like it. Doesn’t like being reminded of how Frank looked handcuffed to a hospital bed, eyes closed and waiting for death.

A tall girl opens the door, squinting at Amy, and yells into the house, “Dad! Some girl is at the door!”

A man with a scraggly beard appears behind her, his face already lit up with recognition. “Amy,” he says. “Didn’t think I’d be seeing you so soon. C’mon, Frank’s upstairs.”

She doesn’t question why or how Lieberman knew her name, but she follows him upstairs into a bedroom. Frank is sleeping, chest wrapped in bandages and his face bruised. Amy feels her heart stutter at the sight, before pushing past Lieberman and thumping Frank on the most uninjured part of him she could find.

“What the–kid?” Frank blinks blearily, looking up into her face. He’s got that perpetual furrow between his brows again, and Amy missed him  _ so much _ .

“Hey, Rough Road,” she says, going for casual and missing it by forty miles. “I’m back.”

 

Amy tells him about Florida once he eats something and isn’t in danger of nodding off again. She tells him about Joe, about swimming in the ocean, and Bill and the other assholes. She says she missed New York. She says she missed him. And she says, quietly, a secret between them, “Don’t ever send me away ever again.”

And Frank, in his ever-giving nature, agrees.

 

Amy passes by that church next to a school once, and she stops in the middle of the sidewalk to look at it. She thinks about being Miss Amanda and Little Amy, and the weight of God in her hands. She never agreed with it all, but she saw it as a home, once.

But now, she has one again.

And she’s just Amy.

**Author's Note:**

> i've started three fics in the past month about amy and frank, only for this one to come to me in a day. title from [here](https://www.guernicamag.com/i-go-for-a-walk-in-the-evening-while-the-body-stays-at-home/). my [tumblr](https://wlwhoneybees.tumblr.com/).


End file.
